I’ve been putting off sitting down and writing about this for a little more than a week now, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just because there’s so much to write about and I don’t want to take the time, or maybe I’m a little afraid that if I type it all out, it’s somehow going to be released from my brain and I won’t have a hold of it as much.

If you’ve followed this blog at all in the past two weeks, you’ll know that I read a newspaper article about five high schoolers from an alternative school in Eugene, Oregon, who were heading to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi to help with hurricane relief – dressed as superheroes. And at this time two weeks ago, with only the added detail that they were traveling in a bio-diesel school bus, that’s all I knew.

(I’ve been working on a documentary on real-life superheroes for the past two and a half years. The documentary has some great content, but it’s been somewhat stalled for various reasons.)

By the time I read the story, the bus had already left Eugene, and the people at the school had no contact (or at least none they felt comfortable offering) with the people aboard. Going off the knowledge that five superheroes would be in this town of 8,000, I took the leap of faith that I’d be able to find them. So at 5:30pm Thursday, December 15, I left work and headed south.

I pulled in to St. Louis (the big city in Missouri, not the little bayside town that was my ultimate destination) a little past 1am, where I stayed with Sara’s sister Erin. I took off in the morning for the virtual unknown.

I didn’t know what to expect. You don’t hear about the hurricane-stricken areas much now that the stories aren’t as exciting. I didn’t know if I’d find a chaotic, third-world disaster area, a tidy reconstruction, or something in between. I had a few friends at different newspapers who had covered different aspects of Hurricane Katrina, and one told me to expect nothing out of the ordinary; it’d been three months – that’s plenty of time to clean up.

Reality was proving to be a little different. Another friend, JXZ in Little Rock, helped me find a hotel room for that second night. As far as hotels go, you’re lucky to find something within 2 hours of the coast. There are still so many relocated people that making a reservation still gets you a warning to check in with the hotel, because the post-hurricane reality meant rooms can be taken with little to no notice.

I ended up in Brookhaven, almost exactly 2 hours from Bay St. Louis. Friday night, I sat down to dinner at Pizza Hut, notes spread out on the table in front of me, seriously doubting what I was doing. I had driven 15 hours, taken two days off from one job and missed one day at another, borrowed a second camera, spent over $150 on more tapes and supplies for my camera and now already spent more than $200 on travel expenses. And here I was, sitting at Pizza Hut, knowing only that five high schoolers were in Bay St. Louis.

It was one of those moments where I knew that I was going to prove something to everyone. Either I’m some kind of visionary whose leaps of faith result in creative gold, or I’m a dreamer of the worst kind, whose lack of any grounding results in the wasted time, money and energy of myself and those who’ve invested emotional stock in me.

I was kind of stressing myself out, but it was in a “pump yourself up before the big game” sort of way. I had something I had to accomplish over the next two days. I was going to have to invest myself completely in those next 48 hours, being prepared for every moment and how the situation would have to be dealt with differently as each hour passed.

I went back, labeled every blank tape in a sequence of “Bay St. Louis – tape X,” charged each camera battery, put new batteries in each of the three microphones I brought, set the alarm for 5am and went to bed.

(to be continued…)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 1:46 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.